Written on May 1st, 2006 at 08:05 am by Darren Rowse
How NOT to “Keep Up”
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by ‘reading’?
Sometimes I get to the end of a day and look at all the unread items in my life (email, RSS feeds, books, magazines, newspapers, articles) and feel quite ill. I have great intentions of reading them all but with only 24 hours in a day and with a family life, social life, work life etc it’s just not possible to ‘keep up’ with it all.
If you feel like this Creating Passionate Users has a good post which you might like to read on The myth of “keeping up”.
While the post is probably more about reading ‘hardcopy’ (ie books, manuals, magazines etc) I think that it’s easily applied to ‘e-copy’ which many bloggers become overwhelmed by in their quest to keep their blog up to date and to keep their head around the niche that they write in. Here are a few of the headings that Kathy writes about that might help us tackle the ‘keeping up’ addiction that many of us face:
- Find the best aggregators
- Get summaries
- Cut the redundancy!
- Unsubscribe to as many things as possible
- Recognize that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes
- Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest
- Be a LOT more realistic about what you’re likely to get to, and throw the rest out
7 Responses to “How NOT to “Keep Up””
brem
May 1st, 2006 10:09 am
Sometimes, it’s like the rabbit hole…
The “one more page” syndrome I call it.
Cary
May 1st, 2006 10:13 am
Amazing, too, what happens when you stop reading so much, and start really putting your time into writing…your blog grows and so does your readership.
I cleared about 50% of my feed list, and I am SOOOOO much more productive.
Oh yeah, and I don’t feel like I’m constantly running a race!
:D
Paulo
May 1st, 2006 10:24 am
This is one reason I switched back to Kinja for my feed reading needs. It was just getting too stressful to follow over two hundred feeds every day. You can’t drink a river with a cup — you have to sit on the banks and watch the current flow by.
Power Play
May 1st, 2006 10:26 am
The assertions are spot on.
Often I’ll hear much of the news on the radio and simply search the news sites for what interests me, brushing past the ones I already heard that don’t especially interest me.
Same with the newspapers.
Chris Albon
May 2nd, 2006 4:27 am
By far the best RSS reader I have found is not an RSS reader at all, but rather Google’s Personalized Desktop.
I have about 200+ RSS feeds I monitor, but I only care about certain article topics. Once I added all the feeds to Google’s Personalized Homepage I was able to skim the titles of about all 200+ feed’s 500+ articles in about 2 minutes (since the GPH only shows titles), openning up the articles I REALLY want to read in tabs.
Then, I spend about 30 minutes to read through all the articles (normally about 15) and I’m done for the day.
Maria Palma
May 2nd, 2006 4:44 pm
Thanks for sharing this, Darren. I was feeling a little overwhelmed today about not being able to read everything in my “pile”. So instead, I skipped everything and stayed in bed until 2 pm, had an ice cream cone, and played “Connect Four”. Sometimes you just need to do that to put everything into perspective :)
JoshHinds
May 3rd, 2006 9:34 am
A resource that I’ve found helpful in keeping up with things that need to be read (so long as it’s digital anyway) is an app called Readplease, I use the free version, and it doesn’t sound as much like a robot as similair programs like it do that I’ve tested. I cringe to look back to when I had to rely on my reading speed alone to keep up…lol
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